Structural Relationships among Household Chaos, Maternal Negative Parenting, Child Executive Function, and Child Aggression

Objectives: This study aimed to identify the structural relationships among household chaos, maternal negative parenting behavior, child execution function, and child aggression; further, it demonstrates the mediating effects of maternal negative parenting and child execution function on the relationship between household chaos and child aggression.Methods: The participants comprised 206 children, aged between 3 and 5, and their mothers. This study observed Cronbach’ α and the descriptive statistics and performed frequency analysis, one-way random analysis, and partial correlation analysis via SPSS 20.0 program. The bootstrapping method was used to examine the mediating effect while the structural equation model analysis was performed using AMOS 22.0.Results: First, child aggression was positively associated with household chaos, mother’s intrusiveness, coercion, and neglect parenting but negatively associated with child inhibition, transition, working memory, and satisfaction delay tasks. Second, maternal negative parenting and child executive function were shown to mediate sequentially in the relationship between household chaos and child aggression. It was also found that maternal negative parenting and child executive function were partially mediated in the relationship between household chaos and child aggression.Conclusion: The data suggest the importance of mediating the effects of maternal negative parenting and child executive function on the relationship between household chaos and child aggression. These findings could highlight the significance of child executive function for the development of aggression and provide the basic data for the program to help those children who show aggressive behaviors in their early childhood educational institutions along with the evidence of parental education programs.

Perception of Working Mothers on Child Development: A Qualitative Study from Pakistan

The inclusion of women in the workforce is imperative for the advancement of every country in the world. In Pakistan the role of women is undergoing dynamic transformation which can have considerable influence on the mother-child relationship and child development. This research attempts to understand the influence of out-of-home maternal employment on the development of child. The study is qualitative in nature using snowball sampling. A total of six working mothers were interviewed from Lahore, Pakistan. Thematic analysis technique has been used to analyze the data. The following themes were identified: (i) Child Neglect; (ii) Strained Child-Parent Relationship; (iii) Child Aggression; (iv) Low Academic Achievement; and (v) Independence and Sense of Responsibility. The study concludes that working mothers need family and employer support to ensure child development in Pakistan. Some of the key reforms that are needed include respect for women’s triple role in society and employment benefits for working mothers.

Staying with discomfort: Early childhood teachers’ emotional themes in relation to children's peer-culture aggression

This research examines one lead teacher's and two assistant teachers’ emotional discomfort as they participated in an eight-month collaborative ethnography of 19 children's peer-culture aggression in an early care and education classroom in the USA. Two questions guided this analysis: (1) What are the emotional themes of teachers in relation to children's peer-culture aggression? (2) How did the teachers utilize an ethic of discomfort when responding to children's peer-culture aggression? Collaborative ethnographic procedures, along with a post-structural account of teacher emotion, were used in a qualitative thematic analysis to determine salient themes and patterns. The data consisted of participant observation, field notes, video recordings of children's play, audio-recorded teacher team meetings, classroom artifacts, informal discussions, and a data-revisiting journal. Over the course of the study, the three teachers moved from resistance to emotional discomfort with children's peer-culture aggression, to a less resistant and more reflexive position toward emotional discomfort and child aggression. This shift occurred as the teachers began to release the goal of certainty and instead acknowledge and accept the unknowing and complexities associated with an ethic of discomfort. The implications center on the importance of teachers’ openness to “staying with” emotional discomfort, as well as making time and space to uncover a range of teacher and child emotions.

Assessing Mothers’ Automatic Affective and Discipline Reactions to Child Behavior in Relation to Child Abuse Risk: A Dual-Processing Investigation

Given the scope and adverse clinical consequences of child abuse, assessment of salient etiological factors can lend critical insights needed for abuse prevention. Increasingly, dual-processing models have been applied to aggression, which postulate that parallel automatic and conscious processes can evoke aggressive behavior, implicating both affective and cognitive elements in both routes. Using two samples of mothers ( n = 110 and n = 195), the current investigation considered evidence of the reliability and convergent, concurrent, and construct validity of the new Automatic Parent Emotion Analog Response task relevant to parent–child aggression, contrasted with a self-reported conscious processing measure. Findings provide evidence that affective reactions of both anger and worry relate to child abuse risk and inclination to respond aggressively, and demonstrate how mothers’ automatic reactions relate to both perceived child misbehavior and child dangerous behavior. Current results lend psychometric support for automatic processing in parent–child aggression consistent with other dual-processing theories of aggression.

Associations Between 11 Parental Discipline Behaviors and Child Outcomes Across 60 Countries

Objective: To test associations between 11 parental discipline behaviors and child aggression, distraction, and prosocial peer relations across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Study Design: Data came from the fourth (2009-2013) and fifth (2012-2017) rounds of the UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS). Survey responses publicly available as of July 2020 were included. Data were restricted to household respondents with focal children under 5 years. The final analytic sample included 163,345 respondents across 60 LMICs. Data were analyzed using Bayesian multilevel logistic regression. Results: Verbal reasoning (80%) and shouting (66%) were the most common parental discipline behaviors toward young children. Psychological and physical aggression were associated with higher child aggression and distraction. Verbal reasoning was associated with lower aggression (OR = 0.92, 95% CI [0.86, 0.99]) and higher prosocial peer relations (OR = 1.30, 95% CI [1.20, 1.42]). Taking away privileges was associated with higher distraction (OR = 1.09, 95% CI [1.03, 1.15] and lower prosocial peer relations (OR = 0.92, 95% CI [0.87, 0.98]). Giving the child something else to do was associated with higher distraction (OR = 1.06, 95% CI [1.01, 1.12]. Random slopes suggested statistically credible cultural variation in the associations between parenting behaviors and child socio-emotional outcomes.Conclusions: Psychological and physical aggression were disadvantageous for children’s socio-emotional development across countries. Only verbal reasoning was associated with positive child socio-emotional development. Greater emphasis should be dedicated to reducing parental use of psychological and physical aggression across cultural contexts.

Emotional Regulation in Mothers and Fathers and Relations to Aggression in Hong Kong Preschool Children

This study explored the associations among emotional regulation in mothers and fathers and preschool children’s physical and relational aggression using a Hong Kong Chinese sample. This study also explored whether child gender would moderate the association between parental emotional regulation strategies and children’s physical and relational aggression. Participants were 168 children aged 4–6 years. Parents reported on their own emotional regulation approaches and kindergarten class teachers rated children’s aggression 6 months later. Path analyses showed that higher levels of reappraisal and lower levels of suppression by mothers was associated with higher levels of child relational aggression. There were no significant associations among fathers’ emotional regulation and children’s aggression. Results from multi-group analysis showed that there were no significant moderation of the associations by child gender. Results highlight the importance of mothers’ emotional regulation in child aggression and suggest that the maladaptive consequences of emotional suppression are culturally relative.